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Introduction: A Renaissance Continued Texas Literature and the Border JOSÉ E. LIMÓN The editors of this volume of contemporary Texas writers have kindly reprinted an essay that I published almost twenty-five years ago. It appeared in a collection of critical essays on the subject of Texas literature, a collection formed in large part of papers presented at a 1983 symposium at the University of Texas at Austin .1 Allow me to return to that moment as a prelude and context for my remarks on the present writing in this volume. As I and others noted in their respective essays in that earlier volume, the conference and the subsequent publication were by and large a response to a provocative essay by Larry McMurtry that proclaimed most so-called Texas literature to be a failure, a questionable body of work lacking in thematic substance , stylistic virtuosity, and intellect informed by wide and deep reading.2 As the reader kind enough to peruse my essay in these pages will see, I took partial but substantial exception to McMurtry’s argument, agreeing in large part that he was quite right for what he identified as Texas literature, but as it happens, McMurtry’s compass appeared not to include a single writer from that particular part of Texas closely bordering on Mexico—southern Texas. It was not a question of McMurtry’s unfamiliarity with that border area so south of his own northern Texas. In The Last Picture Show, Sonny and Duane, the two teenage protagonists, leave their forlorn hometown of Thalia in North Texas and take a revealing road trip to Matamoros, across from Brownsville. It is clear that they, certainly Sonny, in quest of the inevitable sex and liquor, are searching for yet something else in the time-honored tradition of American writers (but also Brits) making the trek to Mexico.3 In yet another place, McMurtry tells us of the South Texan, J. Frank Dobie, and his incursion into Mexico seeking inspiration for his writing, particularly the character of Inocencio in Dobie’s Tongues of the Monte.4 But McMurtry also suggests the reasons why this trek seemed requisite when South Texas was itself so Mexican in the 1930s: “The South Texas that Dobie knew was dominated, then as now, by very ambitious men, and it is not surprising that he should have to cross the Rio Grande to find his figure of innocence .”5 Thus, we know that McMurtry certainly knows the border, but in 1981–83 he seemed not to know its native writers, especially those of Mexican origin.6 ♦ ♦ ♦ 2 ♦ José E. Limón McMurtry seemed not to consider the possibility that a literature was emerging from the border that might prove an exception to his criticism, that is, a literature of intellect, stylistic flair, and wide, substantial reading, one whose exceptionality had everything to do with history. For this area indeed had a much longer history of Western culture than the rest of Texas, a history replete with social conflict that often nurtures significant literature if the other elements are alsopresent.Fortheanalogicalpartofmyargument,Icomparedthepossibilities of this border area to the US South in the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in the early 1980s and under space and time limitations, I identified, among others, the South Texas writers Américo Paredes, Rolando Hinojosa, and Tomás Rivera, as prime examples of this literary emergence. These exclusively Mexican American writers were all well published in 1983. The esteemed Rolando Hinojosa appears in this volume to remind us of a “sense of place,” for him, the part of South Texas known as the Lower Rio Grande Valley, or what another writer from that same place, Américo Paredes, simply called the “Lower Border,” therefore implying an upper border, an upper border not at all unfamiliar to these men. It should be recalled that Hinojosa received an MA from New Mexico Highlands University, at the other end of the Rio Grande, and that Paredes, fresh out of his PhD program in English in 1956, found his first academic job at what was then Texas Western College of Mines, now the University of Texas at El Paso. He was not crazy about the TWC English department, but he always spoke fondly of El Paso–Juárez. Had UT-Austin not called him back, he might well have continued his career on the upper border, and then where would we be in the literary history of this border area? Let us...

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